Fader

Everyone, including us, has talked about this song already. T.I. sounds focused again, look at what actually writing stuff down has done for him etc etc, so instead we're just going to talk about how T.I. has made it pretty much his whole career wearing white t-shirts and the occasional suit or buttoned shirt. Some dudes in our office wear a plain white tee every day. Anyway, this song is actually important because it signals a shift in T.I.'s career, no longer does he feel like he needs to make a first single that equals the wall of awesomeness that was "What You Know," he's cool making understated songs about Getting Through Shit, which is also what we would call Furthering Your Rap Career Gracefully.

Really dude? You're really going to name your album that? And you're really going to have that be the album cover?

Trae as leader of a biker gang is definitely not the first concept we would have come up with for a music video, especially because even when he is bragging about being a rockstar, Trae still sounds sad. Could this video signify a new direction for Trae or could it just mean that he's been hanging out with Jim Jonsin and collecting bandanas? Either way, we're just happy to have new Trae music. Keep listening to those Sabbath records dude!

Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it's Smith N Hack's Tribute. Listen to "Strength and Inspiration" below, buy Tribute here and read about it after the jump.



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Remember Mad Lion? The basic idea of Mad Lion was great, but Mad Lion himself was less so. Kardinal Offishall works off the same blueprint to drastically better results, also Kardinal Offishall works with Akon. Here's the video for "Burnt," which looks like a lot of fun. We haven't seen a rap video with dudes having lots of fun not attached to speedboats or DJ Khaled in a long while.

Sometimes it's fun to imagine that FADER brings artists together. Maybe after our D'Angelo/Beck cover D'Angelo has secretly been spending all his time in the lab with Beck or maybe after the America issue Beanie Sigel and Conor Oberst hit it off and are making the saddest album ever. We didn't say our mindgarden collab ideas would always be flawless. Sometimes though, FADER artists getting together does work and actually makes sense, like this song from Kid Cudi's seemingly forthcoming since forever mixtape A Kid Named Cudi featuring Wale, who you may have heard of about nine million times since we featured him in F44. We are all about artists making good decisions.


Download: Kid Cudi f. Wale, "Is There Any Love"

Obviously we’re not in France, but if we were we’d be kicking back on a boat tonight, toasting the 75th Anniversary of Lacoste with Santogold and Christophe Lemaire, thinking about taking a splash in the "bikini bar" and drinking glasses of diamonds. For their anniversary, Lacoste has collaborated with fashion quarterly Visionaire to create a range of brightly designed Lacoste polos. Each of the twelve shirts is designed by a featured artist, from the likes of David Byrne to filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, and even a design by Karl Lagerfeld himself. You guys in France might have your boat party, but we have margaritas and a kiddie pool. more...

New exclusive Nas. "Queens Get the Money," the opening track to his much-discussed and untitled album, finds Nas in a Kid A mindspace. Rapping over a drumless beat from Jay Electronica he talks about bringing back Arsenio for hip-hop's sake, dubs himself Nasty Nasdaq and shouts out kids in group homes. Will this be the album where Nas creates a new national anthem?


Download:"Nas, "Queens Get The Money"

In F52 we talked about the delightfully gory creations of the metal influenced label, Actual Pain. Lucky for us, starting today and going all the way through the month of July, designer TJ Cowgill will be showing his Actual Pain sketchbook shirt collection at the Mishka Pop Up store in Williamsburg. Cowgill has dressed the shop in paintings and sketches from his personal collection and has the sketchbook behind the counter to check out, many of the designs inside will be or are already shirts. After you go, shake off your faded black denim and hit up Trophy Bar later tonight to check out the Sketchbook Collection party. Time to rage! more...

We're not sure how slide guitars and vibraphones and trash can drums got mixed up with huge house synths on this mix, but it’s probably got something to do with the fact that Kindisch Records is the experimental house sub-label of German techno anthem-makers Get Physical. If M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade are the soundtracks to sunrises in megaclubs off the coast of Spain, then this is the stuff you hear when it’s 10am in Berlin and you don’t think it’s weird that you’re still hanging out with the guy in the mohawk and tank top and his really tall girlfriend.

Download: Kindisch Megamix

Technology is pretty cool these days. Dudes like Munk can make a cool song, get an Ed Banger remix with Asia Argento whisper singing on it and then make a video that looks like an advanced iTunes visualizer that all of a sudden has Asia Argento in it, screaming and whispering and generally furthering our Asia Argento as Riot Grrrl hypothesis.

Last Friday on "The Let Out" (our weekly show on East Village Radio, made possible by Dewars) we had a surprise DJ set from our dude Nick Catchdubs. Unexpected! Also: Excellent! Listen to East Village Radio this and every following Friday from 6-8pm EST and check the tracklist after the jump.

-Stream the 6/27 edition of "The Let Out" here.
-Download the mp3 for free directly here (right-click and save-as.)
-Add the show to your favorite podcasts by pasting this URL into your preferred podcast software: http://www.eastvillageradio.com/podcasts/2008/68.xml more...

Okay so Beck doesn't get older. He's looked the same forever. Instead of aging, Beck just changes musical styles, which is actually part of the fun of Beck. Every time a new album comes out it's like, What's he going to do this time? According to this video preview of Beck's upcoming album Modern Guilt, Beck is making one of those everything albums where he doesn't stick to one thing. At least that means it won't be all sad like Sea Change! Sad music is for suckers. Just kidding, that album is actually good and deserves some revisiting.

I didn’t go to the Glastonbury Festival this year, and here’s why. As it happens, I would have been struggled to drag my broken body around the thousand-acres of rustic terrain, after knacking my knee ligaments playing football. So like it or not, my only recreation this weekend was watching other people at Glastonbury on the telly. The BBC's frighteningly comprehensive coverage only served to reinforce my view that, these days, Glastonbury is little more than a glorified Radio 1 roadshow, staged solely to provide the BBC yoof channels with content for the next few weeks. Was Jay-Z really kept waiting in the wings until Zane Lowe had done his piece to camera? more...

So no, we were definitely not JK-ing about onesies for men, even though the odds—reality versus fashion fantasy—were kind of slim. And while we've documented tons of ladies popping their playsuit collars, waltzing around in florals and fire-colored jumpers (like the Just Cavalli high-waisted silk joint that passed through our office last week, a fashion plaything that will be in our minds for the rest of the summer) there haven't been too many dudes brave enough to shun the grumpy-grandpa/sweaty-mechanic/space-roaming-freedom-fighter associations, and put their best man sandal forward in a jumpsuit. It makes sense that we spotted out sartorially empowered friend and his awesome blue silk parachute one-piece at a Bless (cult German Avant Gardist designers) sample sale, a fashion happening that honestly only just about qualifies as the real world. more...

In fourth grade, after we had our fill of Gary Paulson, we decided to pay attention in the vocabulary section of class and learned the meaning of the word "serendipity." Chocolate chip cookies and x-rays were both invented serendipitously. We had to list things we found serendipitously. Because we can travel time we went to early May 2008 and listed Suckers after a particularly hurried to see Ladyhawk friend made us get there really early to make sure we didn't miss a single bearded note, even though we just wanted to chill at that pho spot on 6th Street a little longer. But Suckers were opening with a trumpet and shorts and slip ons in the rain and male yodel and some heartfelt and forest born emotions. It's a good thing we were thing because we like that kind of thing.


Download: Suckers: "It Gets Your Body Movin'"(via RCRD LBL)

Two weeks ago psych blues monsters and lower Manhattan heroes Endless Boogie released Focus Level, their first album. They've been playing together for eleven years. Their decision to finally record the album only came after they were invited to leave the island and play in the UK for All Tomorrow's Parties. If mentions of "Rare Book Room," "Andy Maclead" and "Matt Sweeney" in the liner notes aren't enough to indicate that Endless Boogie is a true New York thing, consider this: we bought our copy of Focus Level at Amoeba in Los Angeles, where there was one copy in the Misc. E section.

We normally don't make a habit of posting live videos, even if they are by artists we are feeling, but we're doing it now because Jay rapping over "American Boy" is a big deal. We put Estelle on our summer music cover (did you know that yet? Did we tell you that? JUST KIDDING), and having Jay-Z rap over it is the equivalent of him holding up our magazine and co-signing it in front of like 73 million people. Alternately, you could just look at it as an awesome part of an epic show, or a preview of a remix that might be coming out.

Louise Bourgeois’ art is dark. We mean really deep Freudian dark. We realized this after attending the opening of her retrospective at the Guggenheim. At times we were made a little uncomfortable by her rebellious confessionals (and latex phalluses), yet we felt the rush of her rage and understood that she has, for over four decades as an artist, and will always be a profound fighter. While we were brooding over these thoughts, we stopped a few eccentrics along the path, ladies whose styles are just as uniquely their own as Bourgeois’ terrifying spider sculptures, except we’re not having nightmares about these girls, we’re daydreaming about them. more...